Dear Editor: I was exasperated reading Mary Geraghty (Readers’ Forum, “Catholic Values, Sept. 8) reducing the life of Christ to a leftist proponent of class warfare. She calls Him a radical when He was the exact opposite, the perfect reactionary, an enemy of the very revolutions that interpret humanity as a dichotomy between the powerful and the weak.
Jesus holds us all accountable equally. The poor are no better than the rich, meekness is not a product of wealth or the lack of it, and the “powerless” are no less powerful in their moral lives, the things that matter, than the economically or politically powerful. Justice is not a matter of who is in charge but what rules the souls of individuals.
Jesus didn’t say anything new or esoteric about how we ought to live our lives together. He came to demand of us that we act upon what we already know, of what we are unable to not know because God has already instilled an a priori knowledge in us to know right from wrong. It is innate common sense to know that iniquity in the heart is still a sin even if not acted upon, or that we like to blame the existence of the rich for the injustices of our own deficiencies for charity.
As sinners we often refuse to know what we should know, which is why we create fantasies of who Jesus was to effectively dismiss Him, like making Him a socialist revolutionary so we can pretend He only came to condemn certain groups of people, from whom it is easy to exclude ourselves.
Instead, we indulge in happy talk about inclusiveness as though our included evil would have no consequences with progressive “principles” never resulting in excluding “old ideas,” like stable families that value fathers. Creating an “inclusive” society that includes our hatred, slanders, lust, avarice, conceit, drunkenness, envy, laziness, and the infinite ways we convince ourselves our evil is not evil, accomplishes what exactly?
When we stop lying to ourselves we can read the Sermon on the Mount without the need to feel superior to others. We can feel healthy shame, uplift, and hope all at the same time. We understand the challenges, not because they are revolutionary, and those who first heard them understood them not because they were complex or revolutionary, but because they were the exact opposite of those proposed by elitist run utopias. They are distilled sanity, a reaction against the human conceits of “change,” and a statement of the eternal unchanging truths God endowed to our human nature for us to live from eternity to eternity.
JOSEPH CAPUTO
Jackson Heights
